I am sonewhat new to gentoo and very new to sparc hardware. After about three weeks, I have finished installing gentoo on a sparc ultra5. I tried to document my install. In case anyone is interested, the howto is located at : http://www.usd.edu/~djennewe/GentooSparc/gentoo_sparc.html
Feel free to point out problems and to make suggestions. Learning gentoo has been ... educational.

I used them as a guide installing from the current ISO on an Ultra Enterprise 2/300. Everything seems to go smoothly until "emerge system" tries to emerge iptables-1.2.7a-r3. It fails because it seems to be missing the EPATCH _SOURCE file: /usr/portage/net-firewall/iptables/files/sparc64_limit_fix.patch.bz2.

A little Googling reveals that this version of iptables seems to have some bugs and has been withdrawn from availability. As far as I know, I don't think I need iptables (don't intend to do any firewalling with this box). Can I comment out iptables from "system"? If so, where is the "right" place to do that? Or, is there some other solution I should consider?

OK, emerge sync seems to have resolved it. Hopefully I'll know by the end of today if it ultimately works.

As it should, the emerge system process just picked up where it left off, which I assume is OK, in spite of the fact that I did an emerge sync and emerge -u portage after emerge system had gotten through about half of its packages. I would have just started the whole installation process over from scratch but that would have set me back two days and I'm very eager to use Gentoo on my Ultra.